The Beginning is the End is the Beginning
by intastella burst
Summary: She's quiet for a bare instant and then she sighs against his neck. "It's just," and her voice is dull and muffled in the dark, "it's just that it feels like it did before. Like it might be the end." Quadrangle plus Ben. Title from The Smashing Pumpkins.


* * *

If you're going through hell, keep going.

Winston Churchill

* * *

The two knights errant, Sawyer and Kate, don't make it back until after nightfall.

They march back to the residential quarters, coming from the direction of the motor pool, just as Jack and Juliet (keeping a carefully calculated distance of fifteen feet--she's still angry and he still doesn't have an answer) and everybody's mother are making it back from dinner. The returning heroes walk in sync as they merge with the mass, a bit too close together for Jack's liking, and Juliet catches his eye through the crowd, sadly, as if to say _I told you so_.

(So she feels it too--the subtle burn of your paper castle tumbling down around you, and it hurts even though you never really expected it to stand.)

This all in the space of about five seconds (he doesn't count but he knows it to be true), and then people are peppering LaFleur with questions (_Where's the kid?_ In the infirmary, whaddya mean he disappeared? _Why are you with _her_ again?_ Miss Austen here got lost along the boundary line, I was letting her know what's what.). Kate has that deer-caught-in-headlights look again, at all the people swarming around her, buzzing and babbling and crushing, and Jack almost goes to her in the split second before his body catches up with his brain, before he remembers. He breaks away from Juliet's lonely gaze, and perhaps he imagines it, but for a moment Jack is sure that Sawyer is looking at them both with something like accusation stabbing from his eyes.

Jack resists the urge to laugh.

Kate brushes against him as she half-walks, half-runs away, too abrupt to be intentional, and he's suddenly dizzy, and cold. _God, he's so cold._

_

* * *

_

"Alpert said he'll never be a normal kid again. He'll always be one of them." James' knuckles whiten around the hard steel of the bedrail.

Juliet tucks the crisp pristine sheet higher around Ben's neck and listens to the unsteady rasp of his breathing. The gunshot wound is completely healed, but he still appears to be in shock.

"Juliet." She looks up, at his dark eyes, softened with strain, waiting for her to explain, begging her to make it all right. She's never been able to say no to those eyes.

She leans in and cradles his head between her hands, the stark fragility of her near-translucent skin bright against his sun-warmed flesh. She takes a deep breath and feels him exhale with her.

"You couldn't have changed it. Ben was always going to be like this. You did the only thing you could've." (_One, two, three strikes, you're out!_) She doesn't bother to whisper, and her voice echoes high through the empty medical station, but Ben's eyelashes don't so much as flutter.

James wraps his hands around hers, encircling her wrists with his fingers, and moves them to his waist, all the while kissing her, desperately, like he used to, when time was literally unraveling around them and they served as a balm for their mutual grief and the essential choice was between loving (and living, but, you know, same thing, quoth the poet) and dying.

Later, he's gone home to warm up the bed for her (_long day_) and she checks Ben's vitals again. His breathing is calm and even now, a cool soft sound pillowing the night.

"I know you're awake."

His eyes snap open, and though she sits there watching for two minutes more, he never once blinks.

* * *

Kate waits for the lock to click solidly into place behind her and then makes for the kitchen (she hasn't eaten since breakfast, and we wouldn't want to waste away, now would we?), and it's only when she sees that someone's already there that she realizes she's let herself into Jack's place instead.

Old habits, you know, right? _Right._

He spins around at the creak of her foot on a floorboard and laughs uneasily, slipping whatever it is he's holding into his front pocket.

"Hey." His voice shakes, twisting into her chest with the air; it's happening again, and she feels inexplicably guilty, and not just for interrupting him (_the place where Sawyer touched her arm before stings, and 'I'm doing it for her' pounds painfully in her head_). "You scared me."

She apologizes, and makes for the door, but then whatever it is he's hidden in his jumpsuit rattles, like beads or pebbles against plastic, and the lines of his face set and then re-set. There is a flash of anger, and then grief, and then all she can feel is a residual sickening.

The rattling rings in both of their ears for a moment before he jerks reflexively towards her, every mannerism, every expression proclaiming the _I'm sorry _he'll never say. The only one he'll never say.

"So, what happened out there?" The attempt at innocent curiosity falls more than a little bit flat.

She studies him briefly (_she doesn't like the new Jack but he'll make her love him in spite of it, as always) _and closes the remaining space between them in five small steps. "We saved him."

He nods steadily and looks away, pretending that the "saved him" hurts more than the "we."

She hasn't forgiven him, not yet, but he is trying so hard to smile for her when he looks back that she thinks maybe she won't be able to help it.

She slips her hand into his pocket and wraps around his surprised fingers so tightly that it almost hurts her own. The cool plastic of the canister is deceptively soothing on her sunburnt knuckles, and this is a lie but the way that he's looking at her isn't.

"I want to tell you about Clementine."

But Jack wants to start over (he lets the pills drop down the drain one by one), and she kisses him because if she doesn't she will surely cry.

* * *

James lets the book fall flat on his chest, heavy, and presses his palms to his forehead, trying to massage the headache away. Damned impenetrable _Ulysses_.

The read-a-book-a-day, keep-the-doctor-away School of Leadership has been significantly derailed by the arrival of the Fantastic Four, and what doesn't help is that he's pretty sure he's in need of a new prescription. Again.

Juliet comes in then, catching him by surprise as she clicks off the light, and the bedsprings creak as she eases herself in next to him, still fully clothed, smelling of antiseptic and blood and thinly-veiled stress.

"What, am I really that ugly?" he tries, and she laughs dryly, but not like she means it.

He moves his hand blindly to her face, questioning, unsure, and her cheeks are dry, but her skin is cold, like bones, and she's shaking. She pushes the book off his chest--it falls to the floor with a crack--and holds onto him, tighter, harder than she ever has before.

"What's wrong?" he murmurs into her hair, and he feels the words reverberating through her down to her very toes. A summer wind blows in and around them through the open window, making goosebumps pop up on his skin.

She's quiet for a bare instant and then she sighs against his neck. "It's just," and her voice is dull and muffled in the dark, "it's just that it feels like it did before. Like it might be the end." Her fingernails dig into the space between his shoulder blades; he'll have marks in the morning.

"The end of what?" _And what the hell do you mean by _before_?_ He does his best to sound perplexed, and she doesn't reply, but a minute later he feels the quiet slide of her tears trickling hot down his chest.

He doesn't ask her again.

* * *

Ben lies awake, thinking. The steady beep of his heart-rate monitor--the incompetent "doctors" provided by Dharma are still under the impression that he could relapse at any second, that what Richard did didn't _work_, how ridiculous--won't let him sleep, and it's just as well, because how can he rest here, amongst enemies, without at least one eye open?

They'll pay, all of them, the ones who did this to him and the ones who stood idly by alike. He is calm in the certainty of this truth; patient. It'll come around.

Ben lies awake, thinking. Planning.

Juliet brings him a glass of water in the morning and he smiles politely as he takes a sip. _Thank you._


End file.
